Ecco the Dolphin
I never played Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin, but I’m not surprised that it would be linked to John C Lilly: Lilly was once a renowned and respected American scientist, with a particular interest in marine...
View ArticleComputers — Threat or menace?
“Ready or not, computers are coming to the people,” Stewart Brand wrote in 1972, in Rolling Stone — which explains the context for what comes next: That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics....
View ArticleYou Merely Adopted Dungeons & Dragons
Vox Day recently re-shared his Hugo 2016 ballot, where he listed the first draft of Jeffro Johnson’s Appendix N book in the best related work category, and that caught my eye, because I’ve mentioned...
View ArticleHow Hobby Games Introduce Coding Concepts
Game-designer Jay Little explains how hobby games teach basic coding concepts: For me, no other game influenced this more than Magic: The Gathering. I’m a firm believer that if you can play Magic: The...
View ArticleA trend that has been puzzling economists
Economist Erik Hurst is looking at how technology affects labor supply: In my third summer project, I’m trying to understand the labor market and patterns in employment over the last 15 years in the...
View ArticleC-WAM
The Center for Army Analysis Wargaming Analysis Model, or C-WAM, combines an old-fashioned tabletop map — typically about five-feet long and four-feet wide — and pieces with a simple computer database...
View ArticleHow One Man’s Bad Math Helped Ruin Decades Of English Soccer
Charles Reep, the father of soccer analytics, made one big, glaring mistake that changed the course of English soccer for the worse: More than 60 years before player-tracking cameras became all the...
View ArticleCloaks, Daggers, and Dice
South by Southwest included a talk called Cloaks, Daggers, and Dice, which examined how the CIA uses games: In “Collection,” Clopper’s first CIA game, teams of analysts work together to solve...
View ArticleIdishe Melkhim
I haven’t played Crusader Kings II, but I found it interesting that a 16-year-old secular Canadian Jew decided to make a Jewish Kings “mod” to improve the accuracy (and depth) of the game’s depiction...
View ArticleGygax was “eccentric and frightening”
C.J. Ciaramella filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the FBI’s files on TSR, the company that published Dungeons & Dragons, and found that Gary Gygax, the game’s co-creator,...
View ArticleThe games get increasingly difficult as the player’s heart rate increases
Boston Children’s Hospital researchers have developed videogames for children who need to learn how to control their emotions better: The videogames track a child’s heart rate, displayed on the screen....
View ArticleIt was a standard archetype blown out to its extremes
The Campaign For North Africa is no ordinary wargame from the golden age of the hobby: It’ll take you about 1,500 hours (or 62 days) to complete a full play of The Campaign For North Africa. The game...
View ArticleSuccessful games yield “a-ha moments”
A national security game designer at RAND describes how games can help America take advantage of different potential futures: [A] recent RAND project designed a game-theoretic model of conflict in...
View ArticleTaking turns to contrive a story gives off a radical whiff
In 2017, playing Dungeons & Dragons — outside the realm of the Internet — can feel slightly rebellious, the New Yorker suggests: This turn of events might shock a time traveller from the twentieth...
View ArticleHow Winchell Chung forged the first Ogre
When he was a high school student in 1975, Winchell Chung ordered the game Stellar Conquest through the mail from an ad in Analog Magazine: Metagaming Concepts, the parent company of Stellar Conquest,...
View ArticleThe story of the rebel lieutenant
Owen Stephens shares what might very well be the best roleplaying-game story of all time, the story of the rebel lieutenant, from when he was putting on a demo of the then-new Star Wars roleplaying game:
View ArticleMaria Konnikova is putting off her poker book, because she’s making too much...
A year ago, New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova announced that she was diving into the world of professional poker as a new player, in order to write a book about it, and now Poker News reports that she...
View ArticlePlayers aren’t entirely sure who is who
Brian Train has designed a game based on the 1973 Chilean coup d’état that deposed socialist President Salvador Allende and brought Allende’s appointed army chief, Augusto Pinochet, to power. Rex...
View ArticleeSports update
Tyler Cowen shares an eSports update: Tournament prize pools now rival those for some of the biggest events in traditional sports, and global audiences for some big gaming events have surpassed 100...
View ArticleThe Lazy Goldmaker is Azeroth’s most famous financial guru
The Lazy Goldmaker is the World of Warcraft’s financial guru: In August, shortly after the release of World of Warcraft’s seventh expansion, Battle For Azeroth, The Lazy Goldmaker posted one of his...
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